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UQ Holder chapter 002

There are 3 digits in the post title because I’m hoping UQ Holder will break at least 100 chapters.

Although there’s only one character physically introduced in this chapter, there’s one explicitly drawn and another referred to in an offhand comment. Yuuki Shinobu, although probably a girl, her gender is not explicitly mentioned. Up for a trick somewhere down the road? I hope it’s a guy, just because.

“Senpai… no, aniki… no. onii-chan!”

Translation side note. Translation is hard, let me start with that. “Sir” is about as close to “senpai” as you can get in this context. “Boss” is the usual translation for “aniki”. “Onii-chan” is a tougher case. I can’t think of a suitable English idiom in this context (“big boss bro” is definitely not it, but what is?). Then again, I would be lazy and just keep it as onii-chan. This is just a small subtle difference to keep in mind. I don’t really want to turn this into a translation discussion. The real reason though I bring this up is that I just want to get that onii-chan loving going on (♥Dave). End translation side note.

The other character, some guy Shinobu knows, actually has a character design, so we’ll probably see him back in one form or another. The last character is one of Touta’s friends and apparently a genius mechanic. I think he might be referring to either one of the four friends you always see together or the android/power suit guy we saw in the first chapter’s splash page.

References to characters are likely intentional

There’s some stuff about dreams, dreams that are completely unrelated to battle of any kind, Touta even outright denying the need to become stronger. We’ll see where this series is going.

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One thought on “UQ Holder chapter 002”

Nothing much to comment on, since nothing much really happened. So now we know Touta is stil undeveloped because he doesn’t really have a “dream”. And yes, I have not forgotten the whole “Louis Armstrong” support singer thing. It’s just… very shallow in my opinion, just like “I want to become famous by doing something huge!”. It doesn’t sound like something he came up himself, he just goes along with his friends’ dreams. In my opinion.

Well, this gives room for development, so why not. Touta will probably seriously learn how to fight as soon as some serious plot kicks in. It was kinda funny how he didn’t care about learning Shundou or getting stronger. He might as well get his own personal dream and purpose in life later, considering he now has all the time in the world and still suffers from amnesia. And he seems to like Gandhi and finally sees that immortality isn’t that good. He’ll never go bald, haha. 🙂

Now this just makes me think we will see timeskips. Some of his friends seem to appear in the color spread (guy with the bangs and glasses guy, both wielding swords). Touta used to train with them with wooden swords. The Fate lookalike is probably the friend Touta wants to sing with, so maybe he really has some connection to Fate because Fate is a great singer. 😀 Also, the fat guy’s name is Tanaka, right? Wild guess, he is the android guy because he and Chao’s androids during the Mahora Fest have the same name, haha.

And another wild guess: Since I assume we are going to see timeskips, we will see Touta and Yukihime participating in the independence war for Mars and we will see Mana again, who participated in the war.

Oh, and I’ll laugh out loud if Shinobu turns out to be a guy. That would be hilarious. Especially seeing /a/ raging and denying it then.